Courtesy of the Anonymous Coward who replied but has not been modded up yet:
Fluorine and Hydrogen is the most powerful. F2 reacts WAY more energetically than anything else, but I don't particularly relish the idea of storing that shit... Pure fluorine will oxidize damn near anything you can think of, including Xenon and krypton, despite their status as "noble gases."
...if you doubt that Xe will react with F, just look in an inorganic chemical supply catalog... they sell XeF2 and XeF4, albeit in very small quantities, it's that nasty.
Supposedly, no one wanted to figure out how to make a fuel pump for diatomic flourine. It would dissolve even the hardiest fuel pump in seconds. It also produces some nasty byproducts, including Hydroflouric Acid which makes Sulfuric Acid look as mild as vinegar.
Does anyone know if anyone has made a Fl-H rocket engine? Has it flown?
You are right, but not because of the Hindenberg. As others have pointed out, the Hindenberg was destroyed by something else. You also seem to have this strange notion that commercial jet fuel (kerosene basically) is safe. In a crash, I'd rather be in a hydrogen powered plane than a jet fueled one: I'd probably survive. Hydrogen burns up, jet fuel splatters and sprays and burns on the ground. In a crash, the hydrogen would vaporize into a gas (absorbing a fair bit of heat in the process thus cooling the airframe and reducing explosion risk) and float up. If it ignites, it's going to be doing it above your head.
But to your principle point, at least twice as powerful, you are right but not because jet fuel is safer. The hydrogen-oxygen combination is the second most powerful rocket fuel known to science. Per kg, hydrogen burns way more energetically and more effeciently than jet fuel. The only problem is getting enough hydrogen in the plane: you'd have to use cryogenic hydrogen. Then the fuel tanks would have to become giant thermos bottles which ups the weight of the plane and you pretty much loose the advantages of hydrogen.
Hydrogen is safer than gasoline and all those other liquid fuels. It burns more efficiently with a greater conversion into mechanical energy. The only problem we face is how to store it without adding an extra hundred pounds or more to our fuel tanks.
Don't tell me I'm the only one who is reminded of Hitch-hiker's by the claim of a computer that can simulate the EARTH!!!:-)
Re:MSNBC Article on BinLaden and CIA
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Yeah, we've heard that one how many times. That's like playing Chess thinking one move at a time. You have to play the game out to the end, not just to the next move.
What the U.S. could have/should have done is chosen one or two of the many factions--Yes faction*s*, plural--that you could live with and make them the leaders of the struggle. Afterwards, you set them up as the government and use them as a stalwart against the further spread of Communism. The U.S. did that in Europe, Japan, Korea and the south Pacific.
Contrary to popular belief, the mujahadim is not the Taliban. Saying the mujahadim is a bit like saying "Americans" or "Native Indians". It referred to everyone fighting the Soviets. The factions fighting were not just the Taliban, but many other groups, including several pro-Western groups who are now desperately holding onto small scraps of land. They could have been put in power to help rebuild the country and fight the Cold War. Win/win/win. Check and mate.
This policy was used by the U.S. very successfuly up until the first Indochina war (France vs. North Viet Nam). I have never heard a good explaination why the policy (Find a good local faction, support them, make them the government, give them money aftewards to become self-sufficient) was dropped. The only real failure of that policy I am aware of was Ferdenand Marcos.
Simply saying "we had no choice" ignores the fact that we did have choices. Lots of better ones, but people who have little to no skill at geopolitiking (the Reagan administration) chose cowboy actions because it made them look tough. Who cares if it really serves the end goal?
Now watch me get flamed or modded down for suggesting the Reagan administration had little to no kill at geopolitics. But you have to remember: they funded Saddam Hussein's army, they sold arms to both Iran and Iraq hoping they'd bleed each other dry (exact opposite happened), they traded with terrorists and kidnappers. In short, most of their "active policy choices" have accomplished little or made things worse in the long run.
In order to win a struggle, you have to survive the endgame.
Re:MSNBC Article on BinLaden and CIA
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sadly, this is true. I remember hearing about this shortly after the Embassy bombings a couple years ago. In fact, 60 minutes did a profile on Bin Laden and spoke to some of his then supporters in Congress. To say they were upset by the blowback would be an understatement.
We used the Third World (and I do mean we -- even if you didn't support it, we all payed taxes to support it whether you wanted to or not) as chess pieces in the Cold War. This geopolitical game of chess destroyed nations and killed millions of lives. It has tragically disrupted the lives of several billion people, and turned once self-reliant cultures into those begging children you see in those Save the Children commercials. Now we are all paying the price. The game is over, but the pieces haven't finished. Russia has to deal with Islamic fundamentalists who want to splinter the Russian Federation and just plain get revenge on them for Afghanistan. We have to deal with Saddam Hussein, the theocracy of Iran and the Afghani "freedom fighters" like Bin Laden. All cases of blowback.
One would hope we would have learned from these mistakes, but we never do...
Most people who have worked on both research and real world development can tell you that there are always trade-offs to make between what works under limited conditions in a lab and what works in a production system with dozens of variables.
Sarcasm On.You're right. I mean, it's too bad we can't mass produce microelectronics because when they were first invented, they could only be reliably produced in a special lab. Or transisotrs. The first transistors were notoriously expensive because they could only be produced in research laboratories. It's too bad they never figured out how to mass produce them.Sarcasm Off
Industry usually finds a way to make lab research as useful, or more so, in the real world. Microsoft does not seem to be willing to invest in the discipline, like the physical sciences did, to take lab discoveries and put them into production. Microsoft is a sloppy organization that only knows how to steal and copy. Innovation is not their strong suit.
Hypothetically, what if the Paperclip algorithm developed by the researchers actually were pretty smart at learning and predicting the user's behavior but would either eat up too much RAM or take up too much time do perform their predictions?
You mean like Office 97?:-)
Your arguing with a straw man. Office 97 is freaking huge, and as others pointed out, the original algorithm could run fine w/ office. The reason Paperclip got lobotomized is because of Marketing. They turned a potentially cool and useful feature into an annoying joke.
In my original article, I said the internal culture of MS prevents them from innovating in useful ways; instead, they create annoying gimmicks. Read Debugging the Development Process for an inside view of how MS's internal culture works against them.
As for those who loved to point me to the Research page and say, "Lookee! They're innovating in those areas!" No, they're not, and what they are working on will never go into a MS Product. My point was MS Research is suffering the same fate of Xerox PARC: they maybe doing cool stuff, but they're constantly being distracted from it. Their parent company's internal culture prevents them from seeing where true innovation lies and what is really important from a technical point of view.
That's why I find Microsoft's arguments against breakup or restraining orders so nauseating. If they really did innovate, I wouldn't dislike them so much.
The sad thing is Microsoft has spent a pretty penny on research, but because of Microsoft's internal structure and development philosophy, the research doesn't get to do more than provide a gimick or two. E.g., Microsoft research spent a lot of time and money to develop a technique using Baysean probability to analyze what a user was doing and figure out what they were trying to do. The end result of that was the mother-#$! Office Paperclip that popped up whenever you typed the words, "Dear John".
Microsoft Research should be figuring out how to improve the performance of NT's Microkernel architecture, improve virtual memory management on multi-media machines and a host of other useful technologies. But they don't. Go figure.
Does having an out of body experience count?
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Extreme Telecommuting
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· Score: 2, Funny
My body may be physically here, but my mind is a million miles away, so I guess that's a pretty far telecommute, ain't it?
Reading the document, I felt that old shuddering horror I felt when I learned Modula-2. M-2 looks great on paper until you try to build a major project with it.
It sounds like he took Java's design aims and added Nicholas Wirth's bugbears (being an academic) and tried to marry them, but the problem I have is: what's the compelling reason to use this over Java? I didn't see anything in there that gives it a clear advantage over Java, and he doesn't give an alternative to templates. Templates, especially as implemented by C++ and Ada, can create type safe structures that a pure OO design can't (A Stack of Objects cannot distinguish what's being pushed onto it at compile time).
Sounds like he's enjoying the ego trip of making his own language. Personally, I'd rather wait and see what Stroustroup's C++ Redux effort generates.
While I think you have some valid points, you are far too eager to suckle at Microsoft's teat and call the watered down skim soya milk it gives 10% m.f. homogenized.
I too like VB (quit staring at me like that!), and I agree with you that poor programmers give VB a bad man, but I big to differ on the idea that VB somehow protected you from Microsoft's shifting API's. You've read the reviews for VB.Net? Everyone VB programmer out there is screaming blue murder because the object model in VB has so radically changed that it requires re-learning VB. Yes, I said re-learning VB. MFC has changed their official "ways to do things" with each major release that it's necessary to re-learn MFC every major release. Sure, MS can provide some insulation from their API's, but even their insulation can't protect you from the pointy spikes that poke through everytime MS changes its architecture.
One other thing:
An entirely new programming paradigm where everything you ever wanted to do is neatly arranged within the various Class libraries. I know that in and of itself isn't new, but having that kind of support on the OS level IS new.
As an embittered and disgruntled fan of NextStep, I vehemently disagree with your opinion.:-) You want a seriously kick-ass distributed networking object-based API? Try NextStep's Distributed Objects. Can you say, "Sweeeeeeet!"
Other than that, I think you made some good points for people to think about.
If ever there was a more graphic proof why monopolies are bad...
What I find interesting is the parallels with biodiversity. One of the argument for biodiversity, especially in agriculture, is that a wide variety of species will slow the growth of any disease or epidemic. If everyone planted the exact same species and variety of wheat, a single organism could wipe out the global harvest; but if everyone used whatever species or variety they felt like, an opportunistic organism's growth would be blunted. The organism can't adapt and infect to a hundred varieties of a crop, so it will try to infect unideal hosts and fail.
This same argument can be said for software. If everyone uses the exact same software from the same company, then an opportunistic hacker or virus could rapidly take over everything; but if there were more companies and products out there, then the virus/worm would either have to learn how to hack a dozen or more different systems, or it is limited to growth among one particular system. So if MS gets its way, we'll get computer equivalents to AIDS and Ebola creating pandemics of worms and viruses. But if there were more competitors, then no single worm or virus could ever pose much of a threat.
And they don't have engineer quality issues. Lego was also more popular in North America and continental Europe. Does that mean North American and European engineers are less qualified (NOTE: I'm not talking about quantity of engineers) than Meccano trained Britishers? My understanding of the history of engineering in England is it was ruthlessly mired in Victorian mechanical engineering (Meccano) and was unprepared for the electronics and materials revolution that swept the rest of the world.
If he wants to blame anybody for the decline in British Engineering, he needs only look at their "progressive" schools and the cultural inertia that hasn't allowed England's Engineering community to get beyond ironwork engineering. Lego teaches you concepts that work well in electronics and materials engineering, and with Lego Mindstorms, robotic programming. Meccano teaches you how to build steam engines in an age of mag-lev trains.
Notta Benne: Meccano has its place. In fact, I think an improved Meccano (with better quality parts, materials and tools) with the ability to connect to Lego would be a good addition to the world of toys.
First the surfer strikes back with ad-blocking and simple browser configurations. Then the advertisers strike back with Java code that seeks out your ad-blocking software, disables it, then resets your browsers configurations. Surfers will then up the ante by using firewalls and java filters that spot the ad-code, but wait: the advertisers unleash their next generation of ads.
You innocently click on a site and laugh as you see your firewall happily report the Java counter-counter-measure has been stopped, but then you notice something's wrong with your firewall. The advertiser's website detected your counter-counter-measure and has responded with its own counter-counter-counter-measure. It procedes to hack your firewall, deletes your ad-busting software and changes your browser's executable so that you can only surf the web by going through the advertiser's site.
This goes on until surfers are using high-powered automatic assault rifles with teflon-jacketed "cop-killer" bullets to fend off the full marketing assault team busting down your door wearing flak-jackets and using Waco-style tactics screaming, "It's the world's tiniest camera! You must buy it!" Damn those conservatives on the Supreme Court for allowing marketers these liberties under First Amendment protection! But at least they allowed you to use your Second Amendment rights to defend yourself.
A hundred years later, civilization is in ruin. After the nuclear assault launched simultaneously by the Internet Advertising Bureau and the EFF, the world is reduced to rubble. In anger, everyone destroys their modems and Ethernet cards and a Great Burning goes up to punish those who brought the world to this. But somewhere, in a Utah monastary, monks work feverishly copying the last technological works of the 20th century: C++ User's Guide by Bjarne Stroustroupm, and Introduction to Berkley Sockets Programming. Will humanity be doomed to repeat this endless cycle of aggressive marketing?
I just pray they don't get bought by Microsoft.
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Google Plans an IPO
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· Score: 1
Of course! Instead of a web-server, add a peer-to-peer client. Add wireless Ethernet and a Carusoe chip, and you can create the ultimate peer-to-peer network for the third world! Imagine it, paying small children to crank their little P2P stations all day in order to provide free MP3's or find the cure for cancer. It's brilliant. Why didn't I think of this before?
I can't believe you are defending SQL Server. It is crap. The very large organization I work for uses it for an extremely large dataset and it crashes whenever anyone tries to do a large update. At a friends small office, it crashes daily. You are the first person I've met who thinks positively of the product. Frankly, I'd rather use BTrieve.
MS SQL Server makes Open Source look really good. If you're going to put down Open Source databases, at least compare it to a a top 10% product like DB2 or Oracle. They are proven heavy-weights. MySQL, PostgreSQL and other open source databases all work very well while MS SQL Server works so poorly it should be taken off the market as a defective product. It is not merchantable, IMHO.
As for the Bugzilla comment someone else posted, I might add that there are even more websites using MySQL very succesfuly. For example, this website -- Slashdot. We can both point to each others positions and point out poor applications that make the other look bad, but I've seen first-hand more bad MS SQL projects than bad MySQL projects.
In the under 1% of cases in which this assumption about the hobbyist user is true, then free or open source software conveys value, but in the other 99%+, commercial software is superior.
Huh? How do you figure? I've used and been abused by Commercial software for most of my professional life. I still have the emotional scars from just the incidental use of Microsoft SQL server. My experience is we buy some expensive package with a slick box, and find out the code isn't even ready for alpha testing. The more money I've seen spent on software, the less ready for primetime use I've found it.
Example: In 1993/94, I had a co-op term at a company that had recently gotten Internet access. I was hired because I actually knew something about the Internet and how to administer it. The high-priced Lotus cc:Mail to SMTP gateway package was the bane of my existence. The commercial TCP/IP stacks were a pain to figure out and install. Then I discovered the crynwr (sp?) TCP/IP drivers. In less than 5 minutes, I was on the 'Net.
Example: I'd used Microsoft SQL server at my previous company to maintain a bug tracking application. The SQL Server ran on a dedicated machine that was about as powerful as the machine I'm currently using. It was slow and prone to crashing. At my new work, we wanted to use a new bug tracking program, so we converted it from MS-Access to MySQL running on my NT machine (the very one I'm typing on and use to develop). I set up MySQL is no-time flat. It's been up 100% and I don't even notice the load on my machine. It is arguably the 2nd best software I've ever used. Apache is the best, most solid, most reliable package I've ever installed and used.
Invoking Sturgeon's law, 90% of everything is crap, but I'd put the 10% of good OSS up against the 90% of commercial anyday in a caged deathmatch anyday.
Sounds more like to have luck or not than to be smart or not.
You don't know at the beginning if one programmer/artist is good or bad.
You're sort of right. You can't guarantee 100%, but you can do some simple things to reduce your risks:
Is this person has worked somewhere before, talk to their references. If they say nice things, not too bad. If they say they'd like to work with them again, even better. Don't forget to ask what their last 6 months were like. You can avoid burnouts that way.
Take some advice from the founder of Southwest Airlines: Hire for personality, not skills. Obviously, you want a certain level of skills, but don't get obsessed with them having the specific skills you need. Find out if they have the kind of mindset that likes the learn new things, has good creativity and a determination to write quality software. Or for an artist, do they have an imagination on their own. There are competent artists out there who aren't terribly creative.
Get people who are passionate about getting the job done, and who like the work.
These are only some of the ways. It was guarantee you get good people, but it can reduce your risks considerably. Never forget to check someone's references and ask what they were like on the job.
Having recently escaped the gaming industry with my sanity barely intact, let me tell you how you "develop a game", from a business/marketing point of view.
First off, get an idea. Doesn't even have to be good or well thought out, just have an idea that gets other people excited. Then convince a bunch of your friends to come work with you on it, all on their spare time, of course. Develop a presentation proposal. How far you want to go is up to you. You can take it as far as a very descriptive design document with artwork, or a working prototype.
Now you decide if you want to become a slut or a whore. If you want to become a slut, you will go around to a lot of sleezy people trying to raise funds, get marketing contracts, etc. This is a lot of hard work, and a very chancy proposition.
If you want to become a whore, which is easier, you sell your game proposal to a publisher. If you're lucky, one of these publishers will like your game idea and give you a pot of money and a contract. If you look at the fine print, you will see you've sold your body, soul and first born for the next three generations. Invariably, you give up some to all of your creative control (depending on how good a negotiator you are), agree to ridiculous schedules and features and agree that in exchange for this nice pot of money up front, you won't see a dime in royalties unless the game becomes a f---ing big hit. The publisher takes care of publishing the box/CD, marketing and distribution. Also, the publisher is the one taking the financial risk, not you.
So now, you've got a pot of money, with promises of more if you can hit those milestones every month, your team and your game idea. Now you can form a company. If you're smart, you find a low-rent office that's not that trendy (looks like something from Dilbert, say) with basic amenities (like a fridge, water and coffee maker). You and your friends then buy appropriately priced hardware and furnishings and spend your days working on the game.
Now if you're dumb, which would include almost all of you fools who want to go into game development, you'll find a trendy office in a renovated industrial part of town with a cost per square foot that makes a downtown penthouse look cheap. You'll then spend most of your money creating the "coolest place to work ever with free pop!" You and your friends will come up with some fucked-up ideas on how to run a company (let's all go to Episode I two days before a major milestone! YAAAAY!). The technical architecture of the game will look elegant and amazing on paper; the art design and direction looks promising. You start hiring people like crazy by either paying over-market for experienced people or under-market for inexperienced fresh-out-of-school graduates then let them at it.
If you were smart, the next 6 months are quite fun. You and your friends work long hours, but have a good time with each other. Sure, the office is a little drab, but it encourages each of you to go home and have a life. You come back the next day refreshed and able to solve those hard bugs.
You chose simple, workable solutions over over-engineered work of art solutions. Your artists are all capable, creative people who really want to do good work and you appreciate them. Your programmers work very hard to create tools that support those artists and what they really want to do. You buy off-the-shelf tools and libraries rather than write your own. Your architecture is data oriented, not code oriented, so you can create tools that let the game designers and artists directly build their worlds and test out game designs. Sort of like how Doom, Quake and Unreal work.
You have the weird notion of hiring game testers early and having them intimately involved in QA and game design feedback. By having an engine, it simplifies the coding work so you can spend more time making sure your code works. You also save optimization until after the bulk of your game architecture is in place. Game logic changes are easy to implement with the engine scripting language enabling you to experiment with alternate ideas. You set realistic goals for each milestone and hit them on time. The milestone money seems to last till the next one. You buy a fooz-ball table.
If you were dumb, you find you're running out of money before your first milestone hits, that elegant technical architecture has turned into a white elephant. The artists never really got the idea and have created something else you didn't want so you yell at them, they go back and produce crappier and crappier art no matter how loudly you humiliate or degrade them. The experienced programmers sit on their butts all day playing Quake occasionally doing 4 hours work around midnight. Oh, on occasion they will do an all nighter, but after the deadline, it's back to Quake. The inexperienced programmers are introducing more bugs than they are fixing and their output is not "state of the art". The art is the wrong size, format, color for the game, but you've hard-coded all your parameters so you have to go in by hand to re-write pieces of code, change constants, re-compile, test, go back to the artists, etc.
An artist accidentally adds an extra vertex to a polygon and it crashes your game. Don't laugh; this happens. Everyone works insane hours as the Milestone deadline approaches. You burn and burn CD's and you test and test, but you keep finding bugs, or the bugs you thought you fixed came back, or they were never fixed in the first place. ARGH! Midnight comes and goes, and as per your contract, you loose half the promised money. You then work for another two weeks just to achieve the goals you promised 6 months ago, but find you promised too much. You finally get a semi-working version and send it into the publishers. You last payroll bounced, so you desperately need the money.
As the game progresses, all your code is custom. One of the programmers complained he didn't like the CD code for Windows so he's now writing his own. A junior programmer is trying to figure out how to create a custom movie player format for your game, and how to convert AVI's to this new format. Your experienced programmer swore to you the two weeks spent optimizing the vertex transform engine will double the frame rate. Instead, it drops from 15 fps to 12 fps everytime someone sneezes. You test this, and find it's true.
Your testers complain the game isn't that fun to play, but you ignore them because they still haven't found out why the sound is skipping during Quizle's leap from tree to tree. One of your programmers quits for health reasons, another for "family" reasons. They controlled vital sections of the project, so you assign to junior programmers to their old positions. Your money is running out faster now. You sell your fooz-ball table to the game company down the street.
The year is up. If you were smart, your game still has some playability issues and bugs, but it's only 2-months extra work. Your publisher has no problems giving you the time and money because the game looks so good and you've proven you were responsible enough to deserve it. Sure, it's a lot of work, but everyone's happy. The game is fun to play, no one's burnt out or snapping at each other. You ship it out, and it's better than you expected. The game testers gave you great ideas. The data-oriented and engine based architecture allowed you to radically change elements of the game without a huge overhead in re-programming. The game sells a 100,000 units and you're comfortably well-off.
If you were dumb, the game ships out a year after it was due. You've missed payroll so many times, you can't remember if this paycheck is for the missed 3rd or 6th paycheck. You've had to cut back on the free pop. You've laid off staff. Moral is low. The game looks terrible and is unplayable, but you ship anyhow. You get savaged in the media, and made fun of on the game sites. The publisher pays you your last installment knowing that's the last money you'll ever get for this game. Two weeks later, you walk into EB and see it in the remaindered bin for $5. You never got a copy of the game yourself, but you think $5 is too much for it anyhow.
That's how you do it, Sparky. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Slashdot Mirror
In a BIG Way! :-)
Courtesy of the Anonymous Coward who replied but has not been modded up yet:
Supposedly, no one wanted to figure out how to make a fuel pump for diatomic flourine. It would dissolve even the hardiest fuel pump in seconds. It also produces some nasty byproducts, including Hydroflouric Acid which makes Sulfuric Acid look as mild as vinegar.
Does anyone know if anyone has made a Fl-H rocket engine? Has it flown?
You are right, but not because of the Hindenberg. As others have pointed out, the Hindenberg was destroyed by something else. You also seem to have this strange notion that commercial jet fuel (kerosene basically) is safe. In a crash, I'd rather be in a hydrogen powered plane than a jet fueled one: I'd probably survive. Hydrogen burns up, jet fuel splatters and sprays and burns on the ground. In a crash, the hydrogen would vaporize into a gas (absorbing a fair bit of heat in the process thus cooling the airframe and reducing explosion risk) and float up. If it ignites, it's going to be doing it above your head.
But to your principle point, at least twice as powerful, you are right but not because jet fuel is safer. The hydrogen-oxygen combination is the second most powerful rocket fuel known to science. Per kg, hydrogen burns way more energetically and more effeciently than jet fuel. The only problem is getting enough hydrogen in the plane: you'd have to use cryogenic hydrogen. Then the fuel tanks would have to become giant thermos bottles which ups the weight of the plane and you pretty much loose the advantages of hydrogen.
Hydrogen is safer than gasoline and all those other liquid fuels. It burns more efficiently with a greater conversion into mechanical energy. The only problem we face is how to store it without adding an extra hundred pounds or more to our fuel tanks.
Man, are you ever lucky! We got to find out from an industry rumor site 4 hours before they announced it.
I really, really wish I was kidding...
Don't tell me I'm the only one who is reminded of Hitch-hiker's by the claim of a computer that can simulate the EARTH!!! :-)
Yeah, we've heard that one how many times. That's like playing Chess thinking one move at a time. You have to play the game out to the end, not just to the next move.
What the U.S. could have/should have done is chosen one or two of the many factions--Yes faction*s*, plural--that you could live with and make them the leaders of the struggle. Afterwards, you set them up as the government and use them as a stalwart against the further spread of Communism. The U.S. did that in Europe, Japan, Korea and the south Pacific.
Contrary to popular belief, the mujahadim is not the Taliban. Saying the mujahadim is a bit like saying "Americans" or "Native Indians". It referred to everyone fighting the Soviets. The factions fighting were not just the Taliban, but many other groups, including several pro-Western groups who are now desperately holding onto small scraps of land. They could have been put in power to help rebuild the country and fight the Cold War. Win/win/win. Check and mate.
This policy was used by the U.S. very successfuly up until the first Indochina war (France vs. North Viet Nam). I have never heard a good explaination why the policy (Find a good local faction, support them, make them the government, give them money aftewards to become self-sufficient) was dropped. The only real failure of that policy I am aware of was Ferdenand Marcos.
Simply saying "we had no choice" ignores the fact that we did have choices. Lots of better ones, but people who have little to no skill at geopolitiking (the Reagan administration) chose cowboy actions because it made them look tough. Who cares if it really serves the end goal?
Now watch me get flamed or modded down for suggesting the Reagan administration had little to no kill at geopolitics. But you have to remember: they funded Saddam Hussein's army, they sold arms to both Iran and Iraq hoping they'd bleed each other dry (exact opposite happened), they traded with terrorists and kidnappers. In short, most of their "active policy choices" have accomplished little or made things worse in the long run.
In order to win a struggle, you have to survive the endgame.
Sadly, this is true. I remember hearing about this shortly after the Embassy bombings a couple years ago. In fact, 60 minutes did a profile on Bin Laden and spoke to some of his then supporters in Congress. To say they were upset by the blowback would be an understatement.
We used the Third World (and I do mean we -- even if you didn't support it, we all payed taxes to support it whether you wanted to or not) as chess pieces in the Cold War. This geopolitical game of chess destroyed nations and killed millions of lives. It has tragically disrupted the lives of several billion people, and turned once self-reliant cultures into those begging children you see in those Save the Children commercials. Now we are all paying the price. The game is over, but the pieces haven't finished. Russia has to deal with Islamic fundamentalists who want to splinter the Russian Federation and just plain get revenge on them for Afghanistan. We have to deal with Saddam Hussein, the theocracy of Iran and the Afghani "freedom fighters" like Bin Laden. All cases of blowback.
One would hope we would have learned from these mistakes, but we never do...
Sarcasm On.You're right. I mean, it's too bad we can't mass produce microelectronics because when they were first invented, they could only be reliably produced in a special lab. Or transisotrs. The first transistors were notoriously expensive because they could only be produced in research laboratories. It's too bad they never figured out how to mass produce them.Sarcasm Off
Industry usually finds a way to make lab research as useful, or more so, in the real world. Microsoft does not seem to be willing to invest in the discipline, like the physical sciences did, to take lab discoveries and put them into production. Microsoft is a sloppy organization that only knows how to steal and copy. Innovation is not their strong suit.
You mean like Office 97? :-)
Your arguing with a straw man. Office 97 is freaking huge, and as others pointed out, the original algorithm could run fine w/ office. The reason Paperclip got lobotomized is because of Marketing. They turned a potentially cool and useful feature into an annoying joke.
In my original article, I said the internal culture of MS prevents them from innovating in useful ways; instead, they create annoying gimmicks. Read Debugging the Development Process for an inside view of how MS's internal culture works against them.
As for those who loved to point me to the Research page and say, "Lookee! They're innovating in those areas!" No, they're not, and what they are working on will never go into a MS Product. My point was MS Research is suffering the same fate of Xerox PARC: they maybe doing cool stuff, but they're constantly being distracted from it. Their parent company's internal culture prevents them from seeing where true innovation lies and what is really important from a technical point of view.
That's why I find Microsoft's arguments against breakup or restraining orders so nauseating. If they really did innovate, I wouldn't dislike them so much.
Let us not forgive or forget that. :-)
The sad thing is Microsoft has spent a pretty penny on research, but because of Microsoft's internal structure and development philosophy, the research doesn't get to do more than provide a gimick or two. E.g., Microsoft research spent a lot of time and money to develop a technique using Baysean probability to analyze what a user was doing and figure out what they were trying to do. The end result of that was the mother-#$! Office Paperclip that popped up whenever you typed the words, "Dear John".
Microsoft Research should be figuring out how to improve the performance of NT's Microkernel architecture, improve virtual memory management on multi-media machines and a host of other useful technologies. But they don't. Go figure.
My body may be physically here, but my mind is a million miles away, so I guess that's a pretty far telecommute, ain't it?
We did. Ever heard of NAP? :-)
Reading the document, I felt that old shuddering horror I felt when I learned Modula-2. M-2 looks great on paper until you try to build a major project with it.
It sounds like he took Java's design aims and added Nicholas Wirth's bugbears (being an academic) and tried to marry them, but the problem I have is: what's the compelling reason to use this over Java? I didn't see anything in there that gives it a clear advantage over Java, and he doesn't give an alternative to templates. Templates, especially as implemented by C++ and Ada, can create type safe structures that a pure OO design can't (A Stack of Objects cannot distinguish what's being pushed onto it at compile time).
Sounds like he's enjoying the ego trip of making his own language. Personally, I'd rather wait and see what Stroustroup's C++ Redux effort generates.
While I think you have some valid points, you are far too eager to suckle at Microsoft's teat and call the watered down skim soya milk it gives 10% m.f. homogenized.
I too like VB (quit staring at me like that!), and I agree with you that poor programmers give VB a bad man, but I big to differ on the idea that VB somehow protected you from Microsoft's shifting API's. You've read the reviews for VB.Net? Everyone VB programmer out there is screaming blue murder because the object model in VB has so radically changed that it requires re-learning VB. Yes, I said re-learning VB. MFC has changed their official "ways to do things" with each major release that it's necessary to re-learn MFC every major release. Sure, MS can provide some insulation from their API's, but even their insulation can't protect you from the pointy spikes that poke through everytime MS changes its architecture.
One other thing:
As an embittered and disgruntled fan of NextStep, I vehemently disagree with your opinion. :-) You want a seriously kick-ass distributed networking object-based API? Try NextStep's Distributed Objects. Can you say, "Sweeeeeeet!"
Other than that, I think you made some good points for people to think about.
So I guess this could be the new Red Hat marketing slogan: "Friends don't let friends install Windows NT."
If ever there was a more graphic proof why monopolies are bad...
What I find interesting is the parallels with biodiversity. One of the argument for biodiversity, especially in agriculture, is that a wide variety of species will slow the growth of any disease or epidemic. If everyone planted the exact same species and variety of wheat, a single organism could wipe out the global harvest; but if everyone used whatever species or variety they felt like, an opportunistic organism's growth would be blunted. The organism can't adapt and infect to a hundred varieties of a crop, so it will try to infect unideal hosts and fail.
This same argument can be said for software. If everyone uses the exact same software from the same company, then an opportunistic hacker or virus could rapidly take over everything; but if there were more companies and products out there, then the virus/worm would either have to learn how to hack a dozen or more different systems, or it is limited to growth among one particular system. So if MS gets its way, we'll get computer equivalents to AIDS and Ebola creating pandemics of worms and viruses. But if there were more competitors, then no single worm or virus could ever pose much of a threat.
And they don't have engineer quality issues. Lego was also more popular in North America and continental Europe. Does that mean North American and European engineers are less qualified (NOTE: I'm not talking about quantity of engineers) than Meccano trained Britishers? My understanding of the history of engineering in England is it was ruthlessly mired in Victorian mechanical engineering (Meccano) and was unprepared for the electronics and materials revolution that swept the rest of the world.
If he wants to blame anybody for the decline in British Engineering, he needs only look at their "progressive" schools and the cultural inertia that hasn't allowed England's Engineering community to get beyond ironwork engineering. Lego teaches you concepts that work well in electronics and materials engineering, and with Lego Mindstorms, robotic programming. Meccano teaches you how to build steam engines in an age of mag-lev trains.
Notta Benne: Meccano has its place. In fact, I think an improved Meccano (with better quality parts, materials and tools) with the ability to connect to Lego would be a good addition to the world of toys.
ObGharlane: Canticle for Leibowitz
First the surfer strikes back with ad-blocking and simple browser configurations. Then the advertisers strike back with Java code that seeks out your ad-blocking software, disables it, then resets your browsers configurations. Surfers will then up the ante by using firewalls and java filters that spot the ad-code, but wait: the advertisers unleash their next generation of ads.
You innocently click on a site and laugh as you see your firewall happily report the Java counter-counter-measure has been stopped, but then you notice something's wrong with your firewall. The advertiser's website detected your counter-counter-measure and has responded with its own counter-counter-counter-measure. It procedes to hack your firewall, deletes your ad-busting software and changes your browser's executable so that you can only surf the web by going through the advertiser's site.
This goes on until surfers are using high-powered automatic assault rifles with teflon-jacketed "cop-killer" bullets to fend off the full marketing assault team busting down your door wearing flak-jackets and using Waco-style tactics screaming, "It's the world's tiniest camera! You must buy it!" Damn those conservatives on the Supreme Court for allowing marketers these liberties under First Amendment protection! But at least they allowed you to use your Second Amendment rights to defend yourself.
A hundred years later, civilization is in ruin. After the nuclear assault launched simultaneously by the Internet Advertising Bureau and the EFF, the world is reduced to rubble. In anger, everyone destroys their modems and Ethernet cards and a Great Burning goes up to punish those who brought the world to this. But somewhere, in a Utah monastary, monks work feverishly copying the last technological works of the 20th century: C++ User's Guide by Bjarne Stroustroupm, and Introduction to Berkley Sockets Programming. Will humanity be doomed to repeat this endless cycle of aggressive marketing?
shudder
Of course! Instead of a web-server, add a peer-to-peer client. Add wireless Ethernet and a Carusoe chip, and you can create the ultimate peer-to-peer network for the third world! Imagine it, paying small children to crank their little P2P stations all day in order to provide free MP3's or find the cure for cancer. It's brilliant. Why didn't I think of this before?
Hang on. What? Time for my medication?
I can't believe you are defending SQL Server. It is crap. The very large organization I work for uses it for an extremely large dataset and it crashes whenever anyone tries to do a large update. At a friends small office, it crashes daily. You are the first person I've met who thinks positively of the product. Frankly, I'd rather use BTrieve.
MS SQL Server makes Open Source look really good. If you're going to put down Open Source databases, at least compare it to a a top 10% product like DB2 or Oracle. They are proven heavy-weights. MySQL, PostgreSQL and other open source databases all work very well while MS SQL Server works so poorly it should be taken off the market as a defective product. It is not merchantable, IMHO.
As for the Bugzilla comment someone else posted, I might add that there are even more websites using MySQL very succesfuly. For example, this website -- Slashdot. We can both point to each others positions and point out poor applications that make the other look bad, but I've seen first-hand more bad MS SQL projects than bad MySQL projects.
Huh? How do you figure? I've used and been abused by Commercial software for most of my professional life. I still have the emotional scars from just the incidental use of Microsoft SQL server. My experience is we buy some expensive package with a slick box, and find out the code isn't even ready for alpha testing. The more money I've seen spent on software, the less ready for primetime use I've found it.
Example: In 1993/94, I had a co-op term at a company that had recently gotten Internet access. I was hired because I actually knew something about the Internet and how to administer it. The high-priced Lotus cc:Mail to SMTP gateway package was the bane of my existence. The commercial TCP/IP stacks were a pain to figure out and install. Then I discovered the crynwr (sp?) TCP/IP drivers. In less than 5 minutes, I was on the 'Net.
Example: I'd used Microsoft SQL server at my previous company to maintain a bug tracking application. The SQL Server ran on a dedicated machine that was about as powerful as the machine I'm currently using. It was slow and prone to crashing. At my new work, we wanted to use a new bug tracking program, so we converted it from MS-Access to MySQL running on my NT machine (the very one I'm typing on and use to develop). I set up MySQL is no-time flat. It's been up 100% and I don't even notice the load on my machine. It is arguably the 2nd best software I've ever used. Apache is the best, most solid, most reliable package I've ever installed and used.
Invoking Sturgeon's law, 90% of everything is crap, but I'd put the 10% of good OSS up against the 90% of commercial anyday in a caged deathmatch anyday.
Sounds more like to have luck or not than to be smart or not. You don't know at the beginning if one programmer/artist is good or bad.
You're sort of right. You can't guarantee 100%, but you can do some simple things to reduce your risks:
These are only some of the ways. It was guarantee you get good people, but it can reduce your risks considerably. Never forget to check someone's references and ask what they were like on the job.
Thank you. :-)
I learned these lessons well, first-hand. With the number of gray hairs I have now (I kid you not), you can guess I wasn't with the "smart" company.
Having recently escaped the gaming industry with my sanity barely intact, let me tell you how you "develop a game", from a business/marketing point of view.
First off, get an idea. Doesn't even have to be good or well thought out, just have an idea that gets other people excited. Then convince a bunch of your friends to come work with you on it, all on their spare time, of course. Develop a presentation proposal. How far you want to go is up to you. You can take it as far as a very descriptive design document with artwork, or a working prototype.
Now you decide if you want to become a slut or a whore. If you want to become a slut, you will go around to a lot of sleezy people trying to raise funds, get marketing contracts, etc. This is a lot of hard work, and a very chancy proposition.
If you want to become a whore, which is easier, you sell your game proposal to a publisher. If you're lucky, one of these publishers will like your game idea and give you a pot of money and a contract. If you look at the fine print, you will see you've sold your body, soul and first born for the next three generations. Invariably, you give up some to all of your creative control (depending on how good a negotiator you are), agree to ridiculous schedules and features and agree that in exchange for this nice pot of money up front, you won't see a dime in royalties unless the game becomes a f---ing big hit. The publisher takes care of publishing the box/CD, marketing and distribution. Also, the publisher is the one taking the financial risk, not you.
So now, you've got a pot of money, with promises of more if you can hit those milestones every month, your team and your game idea. Now you can form a company. If you're smart, you find a low-rent office that's not that trendy (looks like something from Dilbert, say) with basic amenities (like a fridge, water and coffee maker). You and your friends then buy appropriately priced hardware and furnishings and spend your days working on the game.
Now if you're dumb, which would include almost all of you fools who want to go into game development, you'll find a trendy office in a renovated industrial part of town with a cost per square foot that makes a downtown penthouse look cheap. You'll then spend most of your money creating the "coolest place to work ever with free pop!" You and your friends will come up with some fucked-up ideas on how to run a company (let's all go to Episode I two days before a major milestone! YAAAAY!). The technical architecture of the game will look elegant and amazing on paper; the art design and direction looks promising. You start hiring people like crazy by either paying over-market for experienced people or under-market for inexperienced fresh-out-of-school graduates then let them at it.
If you were smart, the next 6 months are quite fun. You and your friends work long hours, but have a good time with each other. Sure, the office is a little drab, but it encourages each of you to go home and have a life. You come back the next day refreshed and able to solve those hard bugs.
You chose simple, workable solutions over over-engineered work of art solutions. Your artists are all capable, creative people who really want to do good work and you appreciate them. Your programmers work very hard to create tools that support those artists and what they really want to do. You buy off-the-shelf tools and libraries rather than write your own. Your architecture is data oriented, not code oriented, so you can create tools that let the game designers and artists directly build their worlds and test out game designs. Sort of like how Doom, Quake and Unreal work.
You have the weird notion of hiring game testers early and having them intimately involved in QA and game design feedback. By having an engine, it simplifies the coding work so you can spend more time making sure your code works. You also save optimization until after the bulk of your game architecture is in place. Game logic changes are easy to implement with the engine scripting language enabling you to experiment with alternate ideas. You set realistic goals for each milestone and hit them on time. The milestone money seems to last till the next one. You buy a fooz-ball table.
If you were dumb, you find you're running out of money before your first milestone hits, that elegant technical architecture has turned into a white elephant. The artists never really got the idea and have created something else you didn't want so you yell at them, they go back and produce crappier and crappier art no matter how loudly you humiliate or degrade them. The experienced programmers sit on their butts all day playing Quake occasionally doing 4 hours work around midnight. Oh, on occasion they will do an all nighter, but after the deadline, it's back to Quake. The inexperienced programmers are introducing more bugs than they are fixing and their output is not "state of the art". The art is the wrong size, format, color for the game, but you've hard-coded all your parameters so you have to go in by hand to re-write pieces of code, change constants, re-compile, test, go back to the artists, etc.
An artist accidentally adds an extra vertex to a polygon and it crashes your game. Don't laugh; this happens. Everyone works insane hours as the Milestone deadline approaches. You burn and burn CD's and you test and test, but you keep finding bugs, or the bugs you thought you fixed came back, or they were never fixed in the first place. ARGH! Midnight comes and goes, and as per your contract, you loose half the promised money. You then work for another two weeks just to achieve the goals you promised 6 months ago, but find you promised too much. You finally get a semi-working version and send it into the publishers. You last payroll bounced, so you desperately need the money.
As the game progresses, all your code is custom. One of the programmers complained he didn't like the CD code for Windows so he's now writing his own. A junior programmer is trying to figure out how to create a custom movie player format for your game, and how to convert AVI's to this new format. Your experienced programmer swore to you the two weeks spent optimizing the vertex transform engine will double the frame rate. Instead, it drops from 15 fps to 12 fps everytime someone sneezes. You test this, and find it's true.
Your testers complain the game isn't that fun to play, but you ignore them because they still haven't found out why the sound is skipping during Quizle's leap from tree to tree. One of your programmers quits for health reasons, another for "family" reasons. They controlled vital sections of the project, so you assign to junior programmers to their old positions. Your money is running out faster now. You sell your fooz-ball table to the game company down the street.
The year is up. If you were smart, your game still has some playability issues and bugs, but it's only 2-months extra work. Your publisher has no problems giving you the time and money because the game looks so good and you've proven you were responsible enough to deserve it. Sure, it's a lot of work, but everyone's happy. The game is fun to play, no one's burnt out or snapping at each other. You ship it out, and it's better than you expected. The game testers gave you great ideas. The data-oriented and engine based architecture allowed you to radically change elements of the game without a huge overhead in re-programming. The game sells a 100,000 units and you're comfortably well-off.
If you were dumb, the game ships out a year after it was due. You've missed payroll so many times, you can't remember if this paycheck is for the missed 3rd or 6th paycheck. You've had to cut back on the free pop. You've laid off staff. Moral is low. The game looks terrible and is unplayable, but you ship anyhow. You get savaged in the media, and made fun of on the game sites. The publisher pays you your last installment knowing that's the last money you'll ever get for this game. Two weeks later, you walk into EB and see it in the remaindered bin for $5. You never got a copy of the game yourself, but you think $5 is too much for it anyhow.
That's how you do it, Sparky. Don't say I didn't warn you.